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Junk

I’ll soon be headed to Pittsburgh for the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society, where my colleagues and I will engage in discussions about the country’s diverse linguistic forms. We’ll take a break from these serious-­minded colloquies, however, for a lighthearted diversion: the selection of the Word of the Year, the lexical item that best captures the zeitgeist. In a year that brought us vuvuzelas (the dronelike plastic horns at the World Cup in South Africa) and mama grizzlies (Sarah Palin’s cadre of fierce women in the midterm elections), there’s no obvious front-runner in the sweepstakes for WOTY (pronounced “WOE-tee”). But for my money, the one word that sums up the scrapheap of the past year is junk.

This was the year that Greece’s credit rating was lowered to junk status, sending global stock markets tumbling. The junk-bond business enjoyed a boom not seen since the 1980s heyday of Drexel Burnham Lambert. Meanwhile, in the Gulf of Mexico, a feckless work crew tried to plug BP’s underwater gusher with a junk shot, pumping pieces of rope, shredded tires and golf balls along with mud and debris into the blowout preventer. (It didn’t work.) The Obama administration declared a war on childhood obesity, getting legislation passed to keep junk food out of public schools. And scientists found clues for the origins of diseases like muscular dystrophy and breast cancer in the genetic detritus known as junk DNA.

What really put junk on the map in 2010, though, was an incident at once both momentous and sophomoric. On Nov. 13, a young software engineer named John Tyner single-handedly took on the Transportation Security Administration’s new security procedures. Going through the T.S.A. screening at San Diego International Airport, Tyner opted out of the full-body scan, necessitating a pat-down that he felt was a little too intimate. With his mobile phone capturing the encounter, Tyner warned the screener, “If you touch my junk, I’m gonna have you arrested.”

As befits the YouTube era, Tyner posted the video online, and within 48 hours, “Don’t touch my junk” became an anti-T.S.A. cri de coeur — or, as Ruth Marcus waggishly put it in The Washington Post, a “cri de crotch.” In certain online quarters, this uncouth catchphrase was transmogrified into a defense of civil liberty on the order of the Revolutionary War slogan “Don’t tread on me.” (Some were reminded of “Don’t tase me, bro,” the famous plea by a college student subdued with a Taser gun by the University of Florida police at a public forum with Senator John Kerry in 2007. In both cases, a young man objected to treatment at the hands of security and propelled a catchphrase into the public imagination via viral video.)

Thus did the slangy expression junk, denoting a man’s private parts, become a spirited subject of national debate. It’s the latest twist on a word that has scraped along the bottom of the English lexicon for centuries. Originally a nautical term for a piece of old cable (perhaps like the rope that went into BP’s junk shot), it was transferred to unwanted rubbish or poor-quality stuff more generally in the mid-19th century. Heroin addicts called their fix junk as early as the 1920s, around the same time that junk mail was first used for unsolicited postal deliveries. Unhealthful junk fooddates to the 1950s, while other junk compounds, like junk bond and junk DNA, followed in the ’70s.

Junk made its entrance as sexual slang in the work of Ethan Mordden, who wrote a series of gay-themed short stories in the 1980s. In a story called “The Hustler” in the April 1983 issue of the magazine Christopher Street, a character describes rough sex with the line, “That’s when the top man lays you face down on your junk.” (The story was later retitled “Three Infatuations” in Mordden’s anthology, “I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore.”) Mordden recently told me that he borrowed this meaning of junk from a slang-slinging friend who was “so beguiling with his locutions that he could have improvised a recurring role on the TV series ‘Deadwood,’ with its mixture of cowboy gabble and Elizabethan symphony.”

Though Mordden incorporated junk into his own slang repertory, it did not enter into its current vogue as a trashy alternative to “the family jewels” until the mid-’90s. The slang lexicographer Grant Barrett spotted an early instance of it in a 1996 post to an online pro-wrestling forum deriding one wrestler’s “junk grab.” The following year, the term was included in a guide to slang compiled at the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, with the illustrative phrase, “She was all over my junk.” Fast-forward another decade, and junk was mainstream enough to appear in risqué television comedy, as in 2006, when Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake sang in a notorious “Saturday Night Live”video spoof: “One: Cut a hole in a box. Two: Put your junk in that box. Three: Make her open that box.”

Since it’s doubtful that the young popularizers of junk were familiar with Mordden’s fictional forerunners, something about the sound and sense of the word must have made it ripe for reinvention. Tom Dalzell, whose latest book is “Damn the Man!: Slang of the Oppressed in America,” sees junk catching on euphemistically: “To diminish the shock, we call the genitals childish names or use vague and sometimes coy euphemisms — down there, unit or thing.” The Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky concurs, adding stuff as another euphemistic model for junk. Unlike these other terms, however, junk is a harsh monosyllable evocative of four-letter taboos. Only a word encompassing the innocent and the obscene could have made the cultural impact that junk did, and for that it’s worthy of WOTY commemoration.